{"id":3250,"date":"2013-10-28T00:37:43","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T07:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=3250"},"modified":"2013-10-28T00:38:04","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T07:38:04","slug":"the-%e2%99%a5-of-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=3250","title":{"rendered":"The \u2665 of Addiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pumpkin-market\"<\/a>Its that time of year again, when the leaves are turning, a chill is in the air and people begin to get ready for the thanks-oweenie-mas-ukah celebrations.\u00a0 I’d be a broken record if I said yet again that my mother’s birthday was Halloween … or that it will be five years this winter since Mom stopped taking my calls, or emails or cards of well wishing.\u00a0 I’d like to be able to say that in some way, shape or form that I’ve moved on … that the hurt lessens (or is that lessons? \ud83d\ude09\u00a0 over time.\u00a0 That I have made peace with Mom’s unannounced departure from my life.\u00a0 But its simply not true, not this year.\u00a0 Not yet.\u00a0 I still find that I spend time inside my mind in imaginary conversations with Mom, mostly beating myself up for not being good enough in her eyes or trying to figure out why it is that she left.\u00a0 Even my youngest daughter has her own mental stories that haunt her in the dark places of her meaning making machine.\u00a0 She said to me this week, “You know Mom, she’s going to be 70 this year.\u00a0 And you won’t be able to say Happy Birthday to her.\u00a0 And she’s going to die sometime soon and you will never get to talk to her before she dies.”\u00a0 I think in truth, she was working on her method acting skills and looking for fodder that would help make her cry on cue.\u00a0 But I also suspect in the back of her mind she worries about someday being estranged from me.\u00a0 Its unconscionable at some level– my spell checker would like me to consider unconventional, which may be just as true, but more likely it is simply uncomfortable<\/b><\/i> to sit with that feeling that someone you love .. indeed the first person you ever loved in your life and who was the first person to love you when life entered your lungs … could walk away and keep walking without ever looking back to see you cry.<\/p>\n

I’ve called my mother’s cell phone every once in a blue moon just to see if it’s in service … just so she knows that I am sending Love her way .. and just to see that she still won’t answer my calls.\u00a0 Today … for the first time in near five years … someone answered the phone.\u00a0 English was a second language to the person on the line, so my daughter tried in spanish “Estoy llamando para hablar con mi abuela?”\u00a0 Turns out they were Asian.\u00a0 The quality of some cell phones is simply dismal.\u00a0 We actually called three times, not quite convinced that Mom wasn’t there.\u00a0 Because for years, this was the number we had for her.\u00a0 And the fact that it didn’t answer was her usual MO.\u00a0 Being the geek that I am (and feeling rather desparate) I paid one of the peek-at-u places $1.95 to do a reverse lookup on the number and tell me about the person who owned that phone number.\u00a0 You see, this is how we found out it was an Asian family.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 It wasn’t Mom.\u00a0 May not have been her number for years now.\u00a0 Of course, I paid the detective place another $1.95 when they said that they could do a reserve look up on my mother’s last known address and that they FOUND a phone number and email address for her.\u00a0 Unfortunately as soon as my credit card cleared it came back and confirmed only my mother’s NAME … which of course I already knew.\u00a0 And that she lived at the address where my daughter saw her last spring.\u00a0 But no phone number or email address was listed.\u00a0 So … I sent her a case of soup from Amazon for her birthday.\u00a0 ~shrugs~<\/p>\n

Some addictions just linger on .. long after the hope is lost.\u00a0 I have been phoning a number for years now, that isn’t my mother’s.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because I haven’t been able to LET GO.\u00a0 She’s my Mom.\u00a0 I love her.\u00a0 And I miss her.\u00a0 And the pain in my heart still makes me cry every now and Zen.<\/p>\n

Pity I’m not working on a method acting role myself, because I can cry on the flip of a coin.\u00a0 Its just my nature.\u00a0 But over the years, I have been at least successful in depersonalizing the tears.\u00a0 I’ve come to see emotions as clouds that float into our emotional atmosphere and occasionally drop toxic rain upon our fields of glory.\u00a0 There’s not much to figure out anymore.\u00a0 I know my family’s skeletons and I don’t go digging up bones.\u00a0 And I realize fully that my mother is not responsible for my happiness or my melancholy moments.\u00a0 As I told my eldest this week who was feeling frustrated by a situation at her work … “Don’t worry about the mind going off to fret about it.\u00a0 Its just doing what it does by design.\u00a0 And don’t be too concerned about needing to find a solution (when there doesn’t appear to be one) because in truth .. if it wasn’t THIS, then your mind would go and find something ELSE to obsess upon.”\u00a0 Its just what minds do.\u00a0 It isn’t the content that we need to change, we simply need to stop believing it as true.\u00a0 Then, when we can see the NON<\/i> sense <\/i>of it all, it becomes only the background elevator music in our life.<\/p>\n

And of course, until we stop getting ON that elevator … our heart will just keep going up and down and the addiction will smolder under the ashes of dreams that never can come true.<\/p>\n

Well, for me at least one thing is certain … I won’t be calling that phone number any more.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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Its that time of year again, when the leaves are turning, a chill is in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dharma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3250"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3254,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3250\/revisions\/3254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}